Review: It’s all junky business in High Life

The high life enjoyed, if that’s the word, by the four characters of Lee MacDougall’s play is a chemical one. The quartet consists of hard-core addicts who feed their habits by committing petty crimes and have consequently spent a large part of their lives behind bars. Call them another gang that couldn’t shoot straight, except when the shooting is being done with hypodermics

The play was premiered in Toronto in 1997 and was a great success. This, its first major revival, continues Soulpepper’s line of Canadian classics and is the worthiest of the title. It isn’t the deepest play ever written, or the one with the widest significance, but it’s taut and tense and funny, complete in its own world and with no fat on it.

The author has updated it slightly; at least I’m fairly sure that the original could not have ended with the guys, eternal optimists, planning a new scam involving iPads.

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Most of the play concerns a previous scheme masterminded, again if that’s the word, by Dick, who likes to hang out at Narcotics Anonymous meetings recruiting fresh talent. His senior sidekick is Bug, who is rough and surly and very quick to take offence; he can shoot straight, which isn’t always an asset.

An old friend and associate of theirs, Donny, has just about destroyed himself; he currently has half a kidney and little hope of a transplant. He says, not too convincingly, that he’s now clean; he’s also a delightfully gentle soul who supports himself by stealing nice ladies’ bank cards and using them at ATMs, but tries always to return the cards afterward.

This game of Donny’s is what gives Dick an idea for the big score, a carefully calibrated hit on multiple bank machines. To carry it out he needs a fourth player, the young and comparatively presentable Billy who can charm women, especially bank tellers. Billy has never done time, a circumstance that excites everyone’s suspicion, especially Bug’s. Dick has patiently to explain that this may just mean that Billy is to smart to have been caught.

The play’s territory lies somewhere between Damon Runyon and David Mamet: less cute and more genuinely seedy than Runyon (who never acknowledged the existence of dope), but without the broader social ramifications of Mamet. It could be happening in any Canadian, or indeed American, city but its default setting may be Toronto. It’s simply but cleverly constructed. Dick sounds out each of the others in turn. Then there’s a group scene in which a lot of needling gets done, in all senses. Bug can barely be restrained from killing Billy (by several methods) and from at least severely injuring Donny; Billy tries to turn Donny against the others, though this is the least satisfying part of the play. Next we have the heist itself: four accidents waiting to happen in a virtuoso mix of humour and suspense. The guys are the only perspective we have, so there’s a part of us that wants their plan — on the face of it, not a bad one — to succeed, which is anotehrs ource of tension. Finally there’s a cynically shrugging epilogue.

All I could recall from the original production was that most of the play is set in a room but that the big scene takes place in a car. Other memories are hazy, which in a play that depends so much on narrative surprise is probably an advantage, but I have the impression that Stuart Hughes’ Soulpepper production is better paced and balanced than its predecessor.

It certainly benefits from having four actors who have worked together in any number of contexts and who seem, in the precisely differentiated costumes designed for them by Lorenzo Savoini, to be having a blast as High Life’s low-lifes.

Two of them give cast-iron performances: Michael Hanrahan, impregnably tough and dumb and blinkered as Bug, and Oliver Dennis whose Donny, replete with good intentions and conscientious objections, is a beautiful symphony of decomposition.

Mike Ross takes time to get inside Billy’s over-confident skin but he comes into his own when working his magic on the unseen bank clerk and stays there for the duration.

Diego Matamoros as Dick is fine in the central scenes, controlling the operation with barely masked brutality, but in his string of one-on-one encounters he’s surprisingly coarse and forced, with shouting and barking standing in for real authority. He’s also the least convincing junkie of the four; the cravings of the others are palpable but he seems above it all.

If Dick is meant to be faking, the script gives little sign of it. It does, though, provide delightful insight into his former reign as king of the prison, in particular in the matter of selecting the films for movie night. Donny testifies that Dick drastically expanded the cinematic horizons of all the inmates. Dick himself, at moments of crisis, is apt to compare the situation to a Bergman movie. Here he may, and not for the only time, be kidding himself.